Nanis William

“That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I felt the sudden touch of him, like a dream remembered from the distant past, or some memory that began with life. My body pulsed with an obscure pleasure, or with a pain that was not really pain but pleasure, with a pleasure I had never known before, had lived in another life that was not my life, or in another body that was not my body.

......


I held his eyes fast in mine. I reached out and took his hand in mine. The feel of our hands touching was strange, sudden. It made my body tremble with a deep, distant pleasure, older than the age of remembered life, deeper than the consciousness carried within me throughout. I could feel it somewhere in my being, like a part which had been born with me when I was born, but had not grown with me when I had grown. Or like something I had known before being born, and left behind.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I was like a woman walking through an enchanted world to which she does not belong. She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it. She experi-ences the rare pleasure of having no ties with anyone, of having broken with everything, of having cut all relations with the world around her, of being completely independent and living her independence completely, of enjoying freedom from any subjection to a man, to marriage, or to love; of being divorced from all limitations whether rooted in rules and laws in time or in the universe. If the first man who comes along does not want her, she will have the next, or the one after. No need to wait any longer for just one man. No need to be sad when he does not turn up, or to expect anything and suffer when one’s hopes are razed to the ground. She no longer hopes for anything or desires anything. She no longer fears anything, for everything which can hurt her she has already undergone.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value. I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. I also knew that if I lost my job, all I would lose with it was the miserable salary, the contempt I could read every day in the eyes of the higher level executives when they looked at the lesser female officials, the humiliating pressure of male bodies on mine when I rode in the bus, and the long morning queue in front of a perpetually overflowing toilet.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero